July 2025 – Wellformedness

ACL meetings

While I continue to work in computational linguistics, broadly construed, I am feeling less and less motivated to actually attend the core ACL events I’ll denote as *CL (the international ACL and EMNLP meetings, and the regional meetings: EACL in Europe, NAACL in North America, IJCNLP in East Asia, and so on).

This is not a “why I left…” post, nor do I have much constructive criticism, but it is helpful to contrast with the kinds of conferences I attend when wearing my formal linguist hat. As a formal linguist, I overwhelmingly attend conferences in the “ACELA corridor” portion of the Mid-Atlantic and New England well-served by trains, and pay registration fees of $100 or even less. In contrast, I cannot even remember the last time any *CL meeting was in this (rich, populous, and well-educated) region of the country, and I expect to spend my entire travel budget for the year on attending even a domestic *CL thanks to skyrocketing registration fees and hotel prices. (It doesn’t help that these conferences tend to go on for a long time so you need a lot of nights in the hotel.) I don’t know how much the ACL can do about costs, but the *CL conference locations tend towards the random or exotic rather than dense areas with a lot of research output.

There are two other big issues with *CL that make me less likely to attend them. First, other than the handful of senior faculty who are in ACL leadership, and the same invited talks (it’s the same few people over and over…) there are hardly any faculty at *CL conferences anymore. I don’t see many of my mid-career peers, and I don’t see senior people either. Something needs to be done to encourage these people to attend. Secondly, the program of *CL conferences, even in the main sessions, are overwhelmingly inclined towards what are essentially system demonstrations using known technologies, rather than new ideas, critiques, unsolved problems, or system comparisons. To put it another way, I guess I’m glad BERT or GPT-4o worked for your problem, but that kind of talk or poster doesn’t exactly make for scintillating scientific debate.

I continue to work in these areas but I suspect I am going to opt in for online presentation (or just go straight to the journals) more in the future; and perhaps send students in my stead.

Tipping for counter service

In the States, which already had a large and diverse (some would say annoying) set of interactions which de facto required substantial tips (e.g., 15 to 20% of the purchase price), tips are now also requested (though not yet required) for food and/or drinks purchased at the counter. Hip cafes have long had tip jars (with no particular expectation that one uses them), and one is expected to tip the bartender at least a dollar for an alcoholic drink purchased, but the new thing is that anywhere with an iPad-based payment system also requests a percentage tip.

A lot of people are dismayed by this. I for one select “no tip” or “0%” or whatever the majority of the time. But the new “turning around the iPad” normal doesn’t bother me either; at worst it’s a small, progressive tax transferring money from easily-influenced (rule-following? introverted?) consumers making luxury food purchases to counter-service employees who probably need the money more.

Vibe coding in 2025

I have seen a decent amount of software developed via vibe coding, i.e., coding with heavy AI assistance but I have not seen anything that is passable as professionally-developed software. One big tell is that the AI assistant tends to add in copious boundary condition checks that’d never occur to humans because they are unlikely to occur in practice. Another is bizarre style, which imposes a heavy cognitive cost on the reader (whose time is qualitatively more valuable than that of the computer).

For people who basically can’t code anywhere near a professional level, I see why this is valuable, but I think these people should be honest with themselves and admit they can’t really code, and wouldn’t know good code if it hit them in the face.

For people who can (and who can already avail themselves of various autocompletion tools whether AI-powered or knowledge-based), I don’t see the value proposition. It creates hard-to-review code and code review is a more difficult, important, cognitively taxing, and rarified skill than development itself, so this technology could, in the worst case, actually drive up the already high cost of software development.

Columbia and such

I teach at a public university, and I think that is good. Private education is education (which can be good), but it’s inaccessible to most people (which is not good) and has all kinds of other perverse incentives. If at some point in the future you find me teaching at a private school, you can be reasonably sure that I did it, in part, for the money. Of course I have a great deal of respect for my many colleagues who teach at private institutions: they are not, generally speaking, part of the problem.

Higher education is under assault in the US. An interesting contour of the current battle is how much ire is specifically directed at the elite private universities attended by the same powerful people leading the charge. (Donald, Elon, and I went to one of them.) Is this a First They Came… situation for a public educator? It’s hard to say.

One of the many lines of attack is a proposal to federally tax private endowments at a similar rate to capital gains. I recognize this would be a major blow, at least in the short term, for how these private universities do business. It is motivated by perverse political impulses to which I am opposed. But I can’t actually articulate an ethical reason why private endowment capital gains shouldn’t be taxed like, well, capital gains. Furthermore, it is clear that endowments are increasingly the tail that wags the dog of private education. Alumni donors are at war with actual students at these institutions, and the administrators who are prosecuting this war do so in part because of the power they glean from courting said donors. (The other part, I suspect, is because at least some of these administrators agree on the politics, and/or just want to crack a few heads to get the students back in line more generally, making their day-to-day work, of appeasing the donors, easier.) This is an overall bad situation for the institution, I think, regardless of what the moral truth of the issues are. Recognizing the current moment as exactly the sort of “rainy day” the endowment is ostensibly earmarked for, a private institution could really affect a positive transformation of their campus. I doubt it’d happen that way, but it could.

Let us specifically consider Columbia, which is by all accounts at the center of the conflict, and the similarly expensive (if not quite as “elite”) NYU. Both of these registered 501(c)(3) non-profits, but these two institutions (and no others) are also subject to a number of highly-specific state tax exemptions written directly into New York state law. The Times estimates that these altogether amount to $327m (per annum) state tax break. A lot of this is actually exemptions for property taxes; Columbia owns more land in New York City than any other private entity, followed only by NYU in second place. Much of this is clearly just speculation, since neither have much of a campus. (Both also have a bad habit of abusing adjacent public spaces for their own purposes.) The state assembly has considered a number of bills to remove these exemptions, and most of them focus on returning at least some of the funds to the community. Repealing these exemptions would similarly be a short-term shock to these institutions. But once again, I can’t articulate an ethical argument for why these private institutions should be so exempt, and applying pressure to these institutions to sell off the speculative portion of their real estate portfolio would be good for the institutional soul. I intuit that similar things hold of my (PhD) alma mater, Penn, but I’m less familiar with the issues or law there.

Members of private institutions have my full solidarity against the DOGE boys up until we are discussing taxes, in which case I’ll hold my tongue.

In memoriam: Eugene Buckley

It was just announced that Gene Buckley has passed away. I took nearly all of his classes in graduate school, TAed for him, and he served on my dissertation committee, so he definitely had a profound influence on me and my work. I particularly remember his seminar on opacity, which introduced me to substance-free phonology, and his seminar on Kashaya, where I learned about the ancient, mysterious i → d / _ u rule and the many Russian loanwords from their contact with Fort Ross (e.g., [jaːpalka] ‘apple’ < яблоко, with devoicing, stress-conditioned lengthening, and CV-metathesis). Gene was an island of relative sanity and calm during my turbulent grad school year. He’ll be missed.

[Gene’s colleague Rolf Noyer wrote a brief memorial here.]